Challenge: Doing situated research and art production in rural areas with minimal climate neutral infrastructure, and navigating unfamiliar climate neutral infrastructure

SALT. CLAY. ROCK. had a difficult task: we were interested in doing research in unfamiliar rural areas without rail service, using e-cars to get there in order to meet our climate-neutral production goals.

Between Berlin and Budapest we could easily travel by train, but many of the sites where we were working had very infrequent or nonexistent train service. We had to rely on other means of transport. 

In rural Hungary: 

During our research period, there was very little e-car infrastructure outside of the Budapest region. The fact that Hungary’s government was pushing the controversial plan to make the country an e-car battery manufacturing hub had, at the time of this writing, only just begun to trigger deeper investments in e-car infrastructure. For our research trip and subsequent visits to Hungary’s rural areas, it was clear that the best we could do was to rent hybrid cars in combination with rail travel in order to reach our research sites. The only e-car charging station we encountered during our trip was, ironically, in front of the Paks nuclear power plant.

In Germany:

We were not lucky with our travel adventures in rural Germany. At the beginning of our e-car trip through Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, and Lower Saxony, we were excited by the opportunity to travel with an electric car. None of us had ever used one before, and we had the forethought to check that there were charging stations along the way. We looked at the map saw that there were chargers along the way and figured that was that.

Our first problem was that we had no real sense of the car’s range, and had to find a charging station much sooner than we had anticipated. At the Wolfsburg charging station where we ended up, we thought we’d be fine charging the car while we ate dinner. It was a surprise stop in the city known for producing Volkswagens, and it was difficult to find a restaurant that was open. After finally enjoying an unexpected Italian dinner in the town square, we returned to the charging station to find that the car was far from being fully charged. In order to stay on schedule, we decided to press on.

By now, it must be a mundane complaint among those in the know that to rent an e-car, you really need to understand the charging infrastructure you’ll be relying on throughout your trip. We had to learn on the fly that many charging stations are slow and intended to charge a car overnight. We found some stations—for example, one behind a corporate burger joint outside Morsleben—that could recharge the car more quickly. Imagine what our meal was like, and how climate-neutral it and its packaging really were …

One time, our battery was almost empty and we were quite worried. We were relieved to find a charging station at one of our destinations—an information center of the BGE next to the Asse Repository. Unfortunately, only employees, not visitors, were allowed to use it. At our next stop, we arrived almost two hours late because we had to recharge along the way.

The combination of navigating unfamiliar terrain in a new-technology vehicle was overwhelming for us. Because of these problems, we were constantly arriving late to appointments, upsetting our hosts, or reaching our accommodations late in the evening and missing proper meals. It was fun to travel with all five of us in a car, but the rushing around and lack of satisfying food made us a bit cranky.

A June 2022 report stated that, due to a lack of charging stations and infrastructure needed to support its goal of 10.5 million e-vehicles, Germany will likely miss its 2030 e-car target—essential to shifting the country’s climate trajectory. We found the infrastructure to be adequate but patchy, which made for a stressful trip.

In the end, we learned by doing, and we wouldn’t make the same planning mistakes again. At present, e-car infrastructure is organized around regular commuters. We hope that, as the technology improves, travelers won’t need to make as many frequent stops and will be able to enjoy timely meals. As things stand, traveling in a relaxed manner by e-car takes too much time—time that precariously financed cultural workers often do not have.